Firefox added ad tracking and has already turned it on without asking you
Firefox added ad tracking and has already turned it on without asking you
Attached: 1 image So this, from Firefox, is fucking toxic: https://mstdn.social/@Lokjo/112772496939724214 You might be aware Chrome— a browser made by an ad company— has been trying to claw back the limitations recently placed on ad networks by the death of third-party cookies, and added new featu...
Before people completely lose their mind: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
Why is Mozilla coming from the position that what advertisers want is reasonable or acceptable in any shape or form? The advertisement industry existed for centuries without the ability to spy on people and they were doing just fine.
Edit: this being opt-out instead of opt-in also violates the GDPR.
How does this violate the GDPR? It increases privacy and stops advertisers tracking everything you do. This seems to be a good thing.
Advertisers have always been interested in where their ads are seen and whether they convert to purchases. A common example is vouchers, which will tell the advertiser exactly this (10p off, customer redeems, store returns to advertiser, advertiser knows where you got the voucher from/where you saw the advert, where you bought the product - exactly what Firefox is trying to tell them)
Holy crap that actually sounds genuinely good for meeting the advertisers desires without giving up user privacy
Ah yes, the reasonable solution to deal with someone cosplaying as a private Stasi is to voluntarily submit a report of your activities /s
The middle ground is not always a reasonable position.
Ok makes sence but im still relying on the agrigation service acting in good faith. I dont trust anything that isnt my computer. Even with context this is a bad look and not helping Firefox's cause when people start screaming about it without context.
Come on guys lets just fix fingerprinting ik the standard is to make every device identical but thats never gonna work and sounds like an easy way to track anyone who hardens more than default settings. We need to have eveey browser generate different data for every test for everything makw so much noise the signal is imperceptible.
Having this standard means other browser or tech can adopt this technology too and is not limited to Firefox users. This is not just a Firefox thing. And one can still turn it off. The more browser support and enable this functionality, the better, if it means having ads without tracking a user.
If this takes off, it could really make the web better as we know it today. This means websites using this functionality would look like good websites and people prefer it and would get more recommendations (potentially). There would be less reason to block ads, so the websites can earn their money, without identifying us. And without trying to find ways to identify us, without getting blocked, without looking bad. I truly believe this middle ground is key.
A little bit unrelated at first glance, but a related quote from Gabe Newell: "Piracy is not a problem of price, but a problem of service." And I think this goes in a similar direction here. If we provide a better service to advertisements agencies or sites, then they might use it. And that's good for the web.
I've read the "learn more" bit now and I'm going to leave it switched on. (although I use uBlock anyway 😅)
I think this is a legitimate attempt to 'fix' the internet. It seems only very basic information on interactions with ads is recorded by the browser, and then it is anonymised. As an example, the advertiser should only receive counts of how many people bought a product after seeing a particular ad. I don't think they can see what webpage anyone in particular came from, but maybe they can see that: 11% percentage of visitors came from example.com/some-page
Presumably the anonymised data is only provided once the pool is fairly large and wouldn't show 100% of visitors came from cornhub when you only had one visitor 🤷♂️ Obviously websites will always see an IP address.
The idea is for this to substitute for traditional, more invasive, tracking. I think it may one day achieve that.
A warning though: I only just started reading about this.
This happens in every major mastodon thread. Someone claims something without even bothering to research it like the person below did. They make an incredibly big deal about it with tons of claims (which are almost all untrue) and then it gains traction and anyone who doesn’t bother to research now believes something completely untrue.
I’m surprised that no one has commented on the Mastodon post’s author recommending people ‘use a privacy concious browser like Chrome’. What a way to invalidate her arguments
Excuse me while I go and click that 'learn more' button...
Before that don't forget to voluntary submit a summary report of your activity to the NSA.
Must be an account thing because mine is unchecked.
edit: ah yah, today's update added it.
well fuck.
I did the update a minute ago and the option was checked for me.
Edit: From the official explainer:
This feature will be enabled by default with an option to disable it.
ah yah, today's update added it.
well fuck.
I saw all this fuss yesterday and checked on my laptop and sure enough, mine was unchecked.
NICE TRY FEDZ
It's sad to watch them become what they stood against.
Someone tell me pls which browsers are developed by actually decent people? I’ll switch
Firefox is a good example
If you've already read through this and understand what it means and are still worried about your privacy, I would recommend you switch to LibreWolf - it takes all the best practices of hardening Firefox for security and works out of the box. Unfortunately, this means you can't play certain videos, it doesn't auto-update, and some - likely many - websites will break/not work. This is the price to pay for true privacy. If you don't want that, just keep using Firefox.
Sure. Firefox is developed by lovely people.
You aren't happy with your selection of free software and still have the audacity to call the people behind that names? You didn't even read the article did you.
Be a "decent" person yourself and start your own browser. We'll happily judge.
My browser will have blackjack and hookers...
The article is a huge misrepresentation and the author is an idiot.